Karl Marx (1818-83) grew up in Germany under the same conservative and oppressive
conditions under which Kant and other German philosophers had to live. The Enlightenment
had had some liberating effects on German life here and there, but most German
principalities were still autocratic, and the idea of democracy was combated
by all their rulers. The presence of police spies at major universities was
a regular feature of German student life, and some students served long prison
sentences for their political activism. As a law and philosophy student at the
University of Berlin, Marx joined a political club that advocated political
democracy. Very soon after receiving his doctorate, however, his ideas went
beyond mere political reform. His future friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels
introduced him to socialist and communist ideas, i. e., to ideas which progressed
from mere political to social and economic reforms. For the rest of his life
Marx dedicated himself to the project of radically restructuring modern industrial
society along socialist and communist lines. In time he became the single most
important theoretician and prominent leader of a growing international labor
movement.

Since Marx participated in the Revolution of 1848 as an influential newspaper
editor (in a revolution that was defeated by the monarchists, and the defeat
of which led scores of liberal Europeans to emigrate to the United States and
elsewhere), he found it preferable to leave the stifling and backward conditions
of his fatherland and to go into exile. He spent the rest of his life in London,
the powerful center of advanced capitalism and modern industry. As one of the
organizers of the international working class movement he found that most labor
radicals had all sorts of moral misgivings about capitalism, and a number of
utopian ideas of an ideal society of the future, but no solid grasp of how a
capitalist economy actually works. Marx also found that his own understanding
of economic matters was far from complete. He therefore embarked on a two-decade
long study of what was then called "Political Economy" (sometimes
also dubbed "the dismal science").

Living with his family in great poverty, and maintaining himself as a free-lance
writer and journalist, Marx walked almost daily to the British Museum to study
the works of such classical economists as Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Thomas
Malthus. He slowly wrote his main work, Capital, which was published in 1867.
As he was personally much more interested in natural science, literature, philosophy,
and mathematics than in economics, he resented most of the time he had to spend
on the analysis of how money was made. As a classical humanist he thought that
making a living or creating wealth should be nothing more than a means for the
pursuit of more worthy things, not a serious end in itself.

It was not until the 20th century that scholars found an unpublished study by
Marx, the so-called Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844.
This study consists of somewhat unorganized, difficult to read, but highly insightful
notes which Marx jotted down while giving a first reading to the classical economists
as a young man. The study has since gained prominence because in it Marx formulated
more or less explicitly his Theory of Alienation--his analysis of how people
are bound to become estranged from themselves and each other under the conditions
of capitalist industrial production. This Theory of Alienation is often considered
the philosophical underpinning for his later more technical critique of capitalism
as an economic system.

In a nutshell Marx's Theory of Alienation is the contention
that in modern industrial production under capitalist conditions workers will
inevitably lose control of their lives by losing control over their work. Workers
thus cease to be autonomous beings in any significant sense. Under pre-capitalist
conditions a blacksmith, e.g., or a shoemaker would own his own shop, set his
own hours, determine his own working conditions, shape his own product, and
have some say in how his product is bartered or sold. His relationships with
the people with whom he worked and dealt had a more or less personal character.

Under the conditions of modern factory production, by contrast, the average
worker is not much more than a replaceable cog in a gigantic and impersonal
production apparatus. Where armies of hired operatives perform monotonous and
closely supervised tasks, workers have essentially lost control over the process
of production, over the products which they produce, and over the relationships
they have with each other. As a consequence they have become estranged from
their very human nature, which Marx understood to be free and productive activity.
Human beings cannot be human under these conditions, and for this reason the
implication was obvious for Marx: Capitalism has to be abolished as much as
any political oppression if a society’s emancipation is to be complete.
Capitalism is just as incompatible with self-determination as absolute monarchy
or any other autocratic system. But while an absolute monarchy limits people’s
autonomy by controlling them in the sphere of politics, Capitalism does so by
controlling their workplaces and their economic life. A society of truly free
citizens, according to Marx, must therefor not only be a political, but also
an economic and social democracy.

More specifically, real liberty does not exist unless workers effectively control
their workplace, the products they produce, and the way they relate to each
other. Workers are not fully emancipated until they work not in the way domesticated
animals or robots work, but voluntarily and under their own direction. To accomplish
this workers have to become the owners or controllers of their work places--the
factories, railroads, hospitals, offices, and so forth on which they depend
for their livelihood, and at which they spend the better parts of their days
and lives. In contrast to earlier times, however, this ownership of the means
of production cannot be individual anymore, since modern industrial production
has irrevocably outgrown individual production in small shops; workers’
ownership of the means of production cannot but be communal or collective. Communities
or societies as a whole have to make all major economic decisions in the way
they make their major political decisions: by means of democratically elected
legislatures and administrations.

The communal and democratic ownership and control of the major means of production,
and thus of the economy as a whole, is Socialism. In light of the largely failed
attempts to realize Socialism in the 20th century (attempts that for various
reasons ended mostly in undemocratic, oppressive, and economically weak regimes),
it is important to point out that Socialism without political democracy is not
what Marx had in mind. A society without democratic rights and freely elected
governments cannot be considered truly Socialist, even if the means of production
are nationalized or communally owned, as one of the main purposes of the introduction
of Socialism is an increase in the degree of freedom and self-determination,
not a lessening of it. 20th century Communist Party dictatorships have, therefore,
always been defended by their organizers as merely temporary arrangements, as
a way of preparing the conditions for genuine popular democracies that were
to develop in the future. As mentioned earlier in the chapter on Plato, there
has always been a debate--often acrimonious--within the political Left concerning
the wisdom of such temporary dictatorships. Democratically minded Socialists
and Communists always thought that the temporary dictatorships inaugurated by
Lenin had existed far too long to be of any benefit for workers or anyone else.

To turn to the details of Marx’ Theory of Alienation: The most basic form
of workers’ alienation is their estrangement from the process of their
work. An artist, unlike an industrial worker, typically works under his or her
own direction; artists are in total control of their work. (That is why artists
usually do not mind working long hours and even under adverse conditions, because
their creative work is inherently meaningful, and an expression of their most
personal desires and intuitions.) Even the typical medieval artisan, although
more closely motivated by economic needs, usually worked as a relatively independent
person--controlling his own shop and up to a point choosing his own projects.

In modern industry, however, workers typically do not work under their own direction.
They are assembled in large factories or offices, and they work under the close
supervision of a hierarchy of managers who do most of the important thinking
for them. Planners and managers also divide complex work processes into simple,
repetitive tasks which workers can perform in machine-like fashion (Adam Smith’s
famous principle of “the division of labor"). The rhythm of work
is dictated by the quasi-military discipline of assembly lines or other regimented
production systems, and by the requirements of the machines to which the workers
are assigned. Workers thus are mere extensions of their machines, rather than
machines being the extensions of workers. (They are “the tools of their
tools,” as Thoreau put it.) Although workers have to exert themselves,
often strenuously, in operating their machines, they are, in an important sense,
passive--mere objects. Modern factory work, although highly productive compared
with medieval craftsmanship, has become dehumanized drudgery work.

Marx describes the situation in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts
of 1844 as follows:
In what, then, consists the alienation of labor? First, in the fact that labor
is external to the worker, i.e., that it does not belong to his nature, that
therefore he does not realize himself in his work, that he denies himself in
it, that he does not feel at ease in it, but rather unhappy, that he does not
develop any free physical or mental energy, but rather mortifies his flesh and
ruins his spirit. The worker, therefore, is only himself when he does not work,
and in his work he feels outside himself. He feels at home when he is not working,
and when he is working he does not feel at home. His labor, therefore, is not
voluntary, but forced--forced labor. It is not the gratification of a need,
but only a means to gratify needs outside itself. Its alien nature shows itself
clearly by the fact that work is shunned like the plague as soon as no physical
or other kind of coercion exists.

Workers do not control the process of their work because they do not own the
means of production--the factories or offices, the land, the machines, the raw
material, the fuel, or anything else that is necessary to manufacture a product.
The entrepreneur who owns these means also buys the labor power of the workers
that he employs. The workers, therefore, do not only have to work under the
direction of the entrepreneur, they also have to leave the finished product
in the entrepreneur's possession. This latter fact establishes the second aspect
of alienation: the workers' estrangement from the product of their work. Modern
industrial production produces a great variety of impressive things, but these
things have mostly little to do with the lives and needs of the workers who
produce them. In Marx' words:

Labor, to be sure, produces marvelous things for the rich, but for the laborer
it produces privation. It produces palaces for the wealthy, but hovels for the
worker. It produces beauty, but cripples the worker. It replaces work by machines,
but it throws part of the workforce back to a barbarous kind of work, while
turning others into machines. It produces sophistication, but for the workforce
it produces feeble-mindedness and idiocy.

There are some things here to which one may want to object. For one thing, it
may have been true in the 19th century that workers had to work under sweatshop
conditions, that the workday lasted twelve to fourteen hours, that sometimes
children were literally chained to machines to work, that workplace safety did
not exist, that workers were deprived of education, and, most of all, that wages
were so low that workers rarely could afford to buy the things they produced.
But all this has since become very different. Capitalism in the 19th century
may have been rather brutal, but the system has been reformed. Wages have increased,
all sorts of benefits are provided by employers or social security systems,
and today's industrial workers sometimes own and consume more material goods
than even members of the upper classes of earlier ages. The old political cartoons
that showed the Capitalists with top hats, coat tails, and big guts, while depicting
workers and their bedraggled families as emaciated, subdued wrecks, are surely
outdated. Today’s workers are not as exploited and miserable as Marx describes
them, and the relation of Capital and Labor is not so antagonistic and bad as
to justify such old concepts as “class struggle” or “class
war.”

Such objections are not pointless. Due to the long and often arduous struggle
of unions, as well as the vastly increased productivity of industrial labor,
the economic position of many workers has significantly improved since the days
of the Industrial Revolution. Yet, the following facts make Marx' over-all theory
still relevant. First, while many workers today are indeed better off, many
others are not. There are occasional sweat shop conditions even in countries
like the United States, and there are many countries where the majority of workers
are as relentlessly exploited today as they were during the Industrial Revolution
in the United States or in Europe. It is only the physical remoteness of most
low-wage countries from the centers of capitalist affluence that make the often
grim exploitation of cheap labor invisible to us.

Second, the poverty of the working class to which Marx often refers can be understood
in absolute and in relative terms. In absolute terms (in terms of how much workers
have to eat, how much of a house they can afford, etc.) the condition of workers
in highly developed countries has undoubtedly improved since the 19th century.
In relative terms, however (in terms of what workers earn in comparison to what
the owners of capital gain), the situation of workers has worsened. If an average
entrepreneur or top manager once earned perhaps fifty times as much as any one
of his workers, today's owners and managers typically earn hundreds of times
more than the average employee. The general trend on which Marx had his eyes
still prevails: The rich still get richer and more powerful, while the majority
of ordinary employees can count themselves lucky if they have steady employment
and more or less adequate benefits. In America in particular the income gap
between the rich and the rest of society has been steadily widening. Since the
imbalance of wealth usually translates into an imbalance of political power
and influence as well, many capitalist countries tend to be, for all practical
purposes, oligarchies rather than genuine democracies. Although their democratic
institutions may be intact and functioning, their policies tend to be determined
by wealthy elites much more than by citizens at large.

The fact that workers do not own what they produce has far-reaching implications.
Marx approaches these implications by observing: "The object which labor
produces, its product, confronts it as something alien, as a power which exists
independently of the producer." In historical periods when labor was not
as productive as in modern times it may have sounded like an exaggeration if
someone had said that the laborer's product "confronts the laborer as something
alien”--simply because the product does not belong to the worker anymore.
Only in special cases, as when a feudal lord obliges his serfs to build a castle
which is then used to keep down the very people who built it, does such language
seem to be called for.

Marx' description, however, is quite appropriate in a period of capitalist production,
i. e., in a period when the productivity of labor is incomparably greater than
under feudalism or in slaveholding societies like ancient Greece or Rome. The
decisive difference is that capitalist production for the first time in human
history has made it possible to replace, for most practical purposes, the natural
world with a human-made world. While before the Industrial Revolution human
civilization could still be seen as just making inroads into vast areas of wilderness,
the 19th century quickly moved toward a situation where no area of the planet
could escape the effects of industrialization anymore. While until the Industrial
Revolution significant numbers of people may have been able to live independently
of the products and the influence of industry, this became increasingly impossible
as ever greater areas of the planet were subjected to the administration and
utilization of industrial powers. (The fate of the Plains Indians of North America
provides a vivid illustration of this general process.) The most basic fact
of capitalist industrialization is that it has created a world in which essentially
all human beings are dependent on each other--and on the human-made environment
which they have created with their increasingly productive labor. It is, thus,
the entire human-made world which constitutes the product that "confronts"
its makers as an "alien power."

Part of this human-made world is, of course the market and the business cycle
with its often dramatic ups and downs. Business cycles, as well as other market
dynamics, literally confront workers as forces beyond their control, as powers
which often victimize them like floods, draughts, or epidemics. A worker's personal
skill or willingness to work may not change at all, but a recession will throw
him or her out of work regardless of his or her personal qualities and qualifications.
Without any fault on his or her part, that is, a worker may suffer all sorts
of hardships because of the impersonal forces of the market--the "invisible
hand," as Adam Smith called them in his classic The Wealth of Nations.
Yet, while workers are at the mercy of forces beyond their control, it is their
own accumulated labor which creates and maintains these forces. For the market
is not a creation of nature, but the result of human production and consciously
organized institutions. Workers, in other words, decisively help to build the
world on which they are so precariously dependent. They diligently construct
and maintain the production apparatus that determines their lives, and not infrequently
punishes them severely. ("Till now each worker's patient day/ Builds up
the house of pain," as William Morris put it in his poem "No Master.")

The image of workers building and maintaining the machinery of their own oppression
applies not just to the market and its dynamics, but to the modern world at
large. The more people produce (the more they replace the natural world with
an artificial one), the more they become dependent on what they produce. Today
this has become even more obvious than it was during the lifetime of Marx. Armies
of workers, busy and thoughtless like ants, build huge industrial conglomerates
with their corresponding administrations-- conglomerates which produce overwhelming
floods of merchandise, which in turn transform the surface of the earth with
ever increasing speed. Side products of this enormous productivity are awesome
amounts of toxic waste for which vast bureaucracies and costly disposal systems
have to be developed, and terrifying stockpiles of bombs, missiles, and other
weapons of mass destruction which could wipe out this whole civilization in
a matter of days. And periodically people are victimized by these, their own
products, without quite understanding how and why. They are vaguely aware of
these present dangers, but they feel powerless, and they try to escape into
comforting distractions. In their everyday lives the millions are bruised and
mauled by the mega-trends and crises of their human-made world even in times
of peace, and they have grown used to the idea that these forces are something
like a fate, and not the result of human activities and decisions. Hence Marx'
description:

All this results from the fact, that the worker relates to the product of his
labor as an alien object. For it is clear ... that the alien, objective world
will become the more powerful the more the worker produces; ... The alienation
of the worker from his product does not only mean that his labor becomes an
object, an external entity, but also that it exists outside him, independently,
as something alien, that it turns into a power on its own confronting him, that
the life which he has given to his product stands against him as something strange
and hostile.

This sheds some more light on the meaning of the "poverty" that Marx
discusses in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. The poverty
to which he refers is only in part a poverty of material deprivation. To fully
understand what Marx means one has to understand that Marx' highest value is
not material consumption, but self-determination and self-realization. In Marx'
philosophy high standards of living are not defined in terms of ever more food,
drink, clothing, vehicles, appliances--in short, ever more things. A high standard
of living rather means rich experiences, fully developed emotions, closeness
to other people, a good education, and so forth. A person with very few possessions,
but with an intensive life, comes much closer to Marx' idea of a happy human
being than a well-paid worker who can afford to buy many consumer goods, but
who is neither informed enough to understand the society in which he lives,
nor has the motivation to shape, in cooperation with fellow-workers, his working
conditions or the political system in which he lives. A worker who is overweight,
who spends most of his time watching commercial television, whose main conversations
with colleagues deal with the sports page, and who is too tired or apathetic
to participate in the political process--such a worker is not well off in Marx'
eyes, but a victim of a system that is ripe with alienation in every sense.
Marx was not so much interested in what people might have, but in what they
could be. He was interested in people being alive, informed, and in control
of their destiny. Marx was an Enlightenment thinker in so far as he aimed at
personal and human autonomy foremost. And he remained in line with Kant's and
Fichte's thinking in that he expected workers to cease being the passive objects
of history, and to become the active makers of their own fate.

The third aspect of the alienation of workers follows from the first two: As
workers have no control over the process or the product of their production,
because they do not own the means of production, they also have no significant
control over how they relate to each other. They all are just an extension of
the means of production that the owners of capital buy, and which the managers
of industry employ to create and maximize profits. On a limited scale, workers
sometimes organize themselves in labor unions, and not infrequently they practice
solidarity in such situations as strikes. (The camaraderie that often develops
in strike situations is a way of being human that usually has no place in the
modern work world.) But even during strikes workers have to contend with strike
breakers, indifferent fellow-workers, or working-class members who work as spies,
hostile policemen, or "goons." For the over-all situation is such
that workers always have to look at each other as potential competitors for
scarce jobs. (Which is one reason why the managers of a capitalist industry
often prefer high unemployment to a situation where they have to compete for
scarce labor.) The competitive situation among workers sometimes emerges with
particular bitterness when lay-offs lead to conflicts between workers with seniority
and groups who seek a foothold in a particular industry. In the United States,
e. g., white male workers repeatedly displayed considerable hostility toward
women and black men, because in a situation of job scarcity any newcomers were
perceived as a threat. Workers, instead of feeling solidarity and organizing
on the basis of their common interests, found themselves pitched and played
off against each other. The racism and sexism that could frequently be found
among white male workers is one way in which the general alienation of workers
from each other has found a concrete expression.

The fourth aspect of alienation is the estrangement of workers from their human
nature in general, from their "species" nature, as Marx calls it.
Potentially human beings produce freely and with deliberation. Free and thoughtful
production would be the most authentic form of human existence. This does not
only mean that human beings ought to be in charge of particular work processes,
but also that they be able to produce without external necessity altogether--like
artists who create for the pleasure of creating or for some other kind of inner
satisfaction. Up to a point, of course, human beings have to produce to fulfill
their material survival needs. But what distinguishes the human species is that
human beings also produce what has no practical use, such as merely beautiful
things. The horizon of human beings is wider than that of other animals: it
transcends the limits of the survival needs of any particular species. It is,
in this sense, "universal." And it is, according to Marx, only when
human beings have become universal beings that they are authentically human.

None of this can be the case under conditions of capitalist industrial production,
where most people have to labor for utilitarian purposes alone, and where few
are free to work for themselves and under their own direction. In an economic
landscape where the impersonal forces of the market dictate most aspects of
human behavior, most people are unable to ever develop fully their human potential.
Capitalism, in other words, is in conflict with much of human nature, and thus
should be abolished as soon as that is a realistic possibility.